On non-verbal Higher Education programs

Can higher-education make money with non-verbal programs?  

In my last post, I go on about problems with the analytical model for science, math, and MBA programs.    I quoted this: “Students read about the philosophy of Zen Buddhism, among many other things, and learn about how leading Japanese companies have innovated through sharing of ‘tacit knowledge’ — knowledge that is best communicated through long-term, close, personal relationships,” she said. “This is the polar opposite of the Wall Street view of things.” 

There are two questions tangled here, and let me comment on them separately.   I do believe that there is important knowledge that is "tacit" and simply CANNOT,  regardless of effort, be put into the symbolic strings we call "words",   transmitted via words to some other person, and then transformed, within that person back into a changed perspective and new improved insight and intuition.

Much of what is involved in being a "nurse" appears to me to be that kind of knowledge.   The whole existence of Zen koans and the paradoxical method of trying to convey wisdom without words is based on this fact that "much of what counts cannot be counted."  I do think that values and philosophy are transmitted more by contagion than by going through the value->concept->words->teach->learn->concept-> value pathway for sharing.  That pathway has many problems, and many real world important things does not FIT down that pipeline, regardless how clever you are at packaging.  First, it's really hard to package.  Second it's hard to convey in words. And third, there is a huge distance in the receiver's brain between words learned in class and an internalized value system in place where it affects actions correctly.

It is not enough to make it into the left/right brain, whichever it is -- it has to make it into the heart, which is a whole different activity.  It has to be put directly where it influences and affects actions and perceptions,  which is NOT a "verbal" activity nor an "analytical" ability. We have to deal with the FACT that human beings are not computers,   nor should they be, and most of what influences our behavior is not a rapid back-room computer-like rational computation that yields a result we then act on.

If there IS something MBA schools could be doing that would add value, it would probably be either intensive internships,  or intensive use of virtual reality to put students "into" real world or real-world-like situations where this non-verbal transfer of culture and other tacit wisdom could occur.

Of course, as my last post mentioned,  people tend to go where they can measure things.  It would be much harder for schools to evaluate whether a person had in fact acquired such tacit wisdom than it is to evaluate factual knowledge or analytical skills using facts on "standardized tests".    It is even harder to evaluate what the role is of the teaching faculty of such schools, whether they are successful or not, and how to not rumunerate them and give them useful feedback on improving what it is they are "doing" that involves teaching-without-teaching.

Still,   that is precisely where the real world need is.   How can we use a 1 or 2 year break from "employment" to somehow give students situations far more vivid and intense and dense with wisdom than real-life, so that they emerge with the same qualities that they would have acquired, say, in 15 years on the job?

And, in my mind,  how can experiences in the densely social, immersive world of virtual reality provide precisely that kind of human to human contagion transfer of norms, values, and culture that is only found intermittently in real life?   Can we "tune" this so that the "good stuff" is transferred much faster than in "real life" and the "bad stuff"is not transferred at all?

To me, that's the challenge for educators using virtual reality.  Not to figure out ways to convey symbolic knowledge across time and space, though VR does solve that problem nicely, but to figure out ways to transfer non-symbolic knowledge between humans,  assisted by and mediated by a very active synthetic computer-boosted contextual environment.